Stumbling
From Menletter January 2012 By Tim Baehr So
here we are once again at the year's turning. Like
the Roman god Janus, we look backward and forward at
the same time.
And
we make resolutions. And
how did the 2011 resolutions work out for us? Do we
even remember them? How quickly did we abandon them?
These questions are not intended to make us feel
bad; they're intended to show us that we're all in
the same leaky boat. Year after year we resolve to
eat less, exercise more, drink
less or not at all, stop smoking, spend more time
with the family, knuckle down and get that degree or
promotion, read War and Peace.
Okay, some of us succeed - don't gloat. But it
almost seems as though, for most of us, our New
Year's resolutions contain within themselves the
seeds of their own destruction. I've
written almost yearly about New Year's resolutions,
often about my own. Maybe I thought that making
public my intentions, I'd feel more compelled to act
on them. Things didn't quite work out. So
I've been thinking back on major decisions and
changes, and none of them involved New Year's
resolutions. They happened because something hit me
upside the head. Giving up tobacco and alcohol,
controlling weight, practicing meditation, even
starting this newsletter, have
come about when I felt an inner compulsion to act.
Compared to the impulse of a keenly felt need, a New
Year's resolution is thin soup. The
upside-the-head stuff can be effective, but I
suspect most of us have ignored some pretty big
hits. A lot of the time, I wasn't listening, I
wasn't looking, I wasn't
feeling. Sometimes it took multiple whacks for me to
get the message. And I'm probably ignoring a few
even as I type this. So
maybe the best resolution to make is to listen,
look, and feel - to pay attention, to be as open as
possible to the messages that come from without and
within. One
more thing: an awkward stumble - illness, an
unintended cruelty, a weekend we can't remember, a
DUI citation, a major deadline missed - can be an
opportunity to pay attention. But the first and
obvious message from a stumble is to regain
equilibrium, to try to make the insult go away. A
saying attributed to Winston Churchill goes, "People
stumble over opportunities every day, most just pick
themselves up and carry
on walking." Happy
New Year. ©Copyright
2012 by Tim Baehr
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